Engineers use compression (also called source coding or source encoding) to reduce the bit rate of digital video. Compression decreases the cost of storing and transmitting video information by converting the information into a lower bit rate form. Decompression (also called decoding) reconstructs a version of the original information from the compressed form. A “codec” is an encoder/decoder system.
Over the last 25 years, various video codec standards have been adopted, including the ITU-T H.261, H.262 (MPEG-2 or ISO/IEC 13818-2), H.263 and H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC or ISO/IEC 14496-10) standards, the MPEG-1 (ISO/IEC 11172-2) and MPEG-4 Visual (ISO/IEC 14496-2) standards, and the SMPTE 421M (VC-1) standard. More recently, the H.265/HEVC standard (ITU-T H.265 or ISO/IEC 23008-2) has been approved. Extensions to the H.265/HEVC standard (e.g., for scalable video coding/decoding, for coding/decoding of video with higher fidelity in terms of sample bit depth or chroma sampling rate, for screen capture content, or for multi-view coding/decoding) are currently under development. A video codec standard typically defines options for the syntax of an encoded video bitstream, detailing parameters in the bitstream when particular features are used in encoding and decoding. In many cases, a video codec standard also provides details about the decoding operations a decoder should perform to achieve conforming results in decoding. Aside from codec standards, various proprietary codec formats define other options for the syntax of an encoded video bitstream and corresponding decoding operations.
A video source such as a camera, animation output, screen capture module, etc. typically provides video in a particular color space. In general, a color space (sometimes called a color model) is a model for representing colors as n values per physical position, for n≥1, where each of the n values provides a color component value for that position. For example, in a YUV color space, a luma (or Y) component value represents an approximate brightness at a position and multiple chroma (or U and V) component values represent color differences at the position. Or, in an RGB color space, a red (R) component value represents a red intensity, a green (G) component value represents a green intensity, and a blue (B) component value represents a blue intensity at a position. Historically, different color spaces have advantages for different applications such as display, printing, broadcasting and encoding/decoding. Sample values can be converted between color spaces using color space transformation operations.
Many commercially available video encoders and decoders support only a YUV format. Other commercially available encoders and decoders (e.g., for the H.264/AVC standard or H.265/HEVC standard) allow an encoder to specify a color space for a given sequence. The specified color space is used for the entire video sequence. These approaches do not provide sufficient flexibility for a general-purpose codec system that may process very different kinds of video content within a single video sequence. More recently, approaches to switching between color spaces during encoding or decoding have been considered, but these approaches have not addressed various challenges in real-world implementations.